Posts Tagged ‘stats’

Facebook has become a huge presence on the Web. A full 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world have some form of official Facebook integration on their homepage. And if you include regular links to Facebook, the number soars up to a highly impressive 49.3%.

Now after Facebook has had its much talked-about IPO, it’s worth noting how close the social network is to becoming part of the Web’s DNA. When so many websites have some form of Facebook integration, maybe we’re already there.

Even today, in 2012, some people don’t have broadband Internet connections, relying instead on phone lines and those good old dial-up modems. By today’s standards, those connections are extremely slow. Not only is the transfer speed slow, the latency is worse too.

On top of that, today’s websites are generally not designed for such slow connections. Surfing the web on a dial-up modem today is character building. That’s what you say about excruciating, painful experiences, right?

We wanted to see just how bad the situation is today. How long do regular web pages take to load over dial-up?

The United States may be overtaken by China as the world’s largest smartphone market this year, but it’s nevertheless a huge and highly influential market. According to Comscore, more than 100 million Americans now own a smartphone, a number that keeps growing.

We thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the state of the US smartphone market. Where is it, and what are the trends? As you’ll see, things have changed dramatically in very little time.

An investment in Apple stock 10 years ago would be worth 47 times as much today. An investment in Amazon would have given you 14 times your money back. Not a bad way to spend some dollars in 2002.

Those are far from the only stocks that would have given huge returns over a 10-year time span, though. Other notable mentions include Akamai and Red Hat, both returning more than 10 times the money over the past 10 years.

If you list the top 100 sites in the world (according to Alexa), you’ll find that 23 are owned by Google. That’s a massive share for a single company.

How does Google have such a huge presence? The main reason is the large number of localized versions of Google Search, such as Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.fr, Google.de, etc. Almost every country has one, and due to their popularity, 17 are among the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet.

As we reported last Friday, the number of DNS root servers on the Internet has grown significantly the past few years. Now we will take a closer look at how those root servers are distributed across the world.

Since the root servers are critical to Internet’s DNS infrastructure, they would ideally be spread out in a way that serves the Internet population in a fair and even manner. That is, however, not the case.

The United States is the “founding father” of the Internet, so it’s somewhat ironic that none of the 50 best-connected cities in the world today is American.

Instead, the list of the top 50 cities in terms of connection speed is dominated by South Korea and Japan. Cities from only two other countries make an appearance: China (with Hong Kong), and Sweden (with Umeå and Göteborg). Amazingly, only four countries have cities on this list.

We’re going to show you a chart that confirms what some of you already suspected, and Microsoft probably isn’t too happy about. A lot of people only use Internet Explorer because they have to at the office, but at home they use a different web browser.

On workdays around 35.1% of all web browsing is done with IE. On weekends that number consistently drops to around 32.8%.

So if IE usage dips every weekend, which browsers do people use instead? For the most part, Google’s Chrome. On weekends, IE and Chrome usage is pretty much neck and neck these days. You could say that for home use, they are now on equal terms.

This year the number of Internet users worldwide reached 2.27 billion, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15 billion. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.

The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.

About the Royal Pingdom blog

This blog is the place for official news about Pingdom the company and our products and services.
You will also find tips about our services, such as our website monitoring, real user monitoring,
transaction monitoring, and more.

We also ramble and muse about technology in general, and the Internet and web technology, in particular.